Larry Kruger, a knowledgeable media voice in San Francisco, points out an irony: fans are reluctant to criticise the manager in baseball, but feel very free to criticise the head coach and/or general manager in football. Yet this is backwards. Many, many fans actually do have levels of expertise about baseball that they could step in and manage an MLB game or even a week, but nearly everyone would be completely at sea in the NFL. We know zero about the latter. While the professional baseball game has gotten more sophisticated because of statistics and matchups over the last few years, an enormous percentage of the decisions a manager would face have already been made before he gets there. He has a rotation of pitchers already. You might play with that a little, but when it is already up and running in June, deciding that what you have been doing isn't working and bringing in someone else is already recognised as a high-risk strategy. You drop your fifth starter and bring in your spot starter, or maybe some hotshot from the minors for a game. If you have injuries, everyone can look at the roster and see how limited your choices are.
But what about bringing in a reliever, huh? From 1970-2000 the answer was "when the starting pitcher has let in five runs and is in danger of letting in the sixth," and the decades before and after were only marginally different. Beyond that, you have your set-up guy and your closer. Your choice is to bring them in for between 2-4 batters. At the various positions, you only have so many third basement and especially, catchers. In a doubleheader you use both, and who the pitcher seems to work well with dictates that.
Steal or don't steal? That depends more on the player than the situation. Hit and run? Probably no. They work great in retrospect, no so well in prediction. Making sure your players know the infield fly rule? Should be spring training stuff. Baseball managers make their living by what they do in terms of players over the long run, keeping jerks focused on the main goals and the good guys encouraged that someone is noticing their good attitude. They have value in the personnel decisions on the slow turning of the wheel, so that pitchers don't have their arms worn out or young players get discouraged by not playing.
There is a great deal of specialised skill in scouting, coaching hitting, and "minor" medical evaluation and treatment. But you're the manager. Someone else does that for you. But managing? Bring in Michael, bsking's father, for a week in July, and the number of victories that team gets is probably the same as Tommy Lasorda or Tony LaRussa. Because what those two Hall-of-Famers were going to do that week is already known. A late-inning situational decision? Those are already percentage bets to begin with, so Michael is going to be as good as anyone else. If he needs the pitcher-batter breakdown in real time, someone can bring it to him and then...it's still a percentage bet.
So why do a majority of fans think this is beyond them, and the guy in the dugout is possessed or arcane skills of which they know not? Because they know that don't watch 162 games and he does, so they are less confident.
In football, you could maybe make the argument that a top high-school coach could come in and be Andy Reid for a play or two, but that would be because Reid had set up an information flow that would work for that long without him. But the number of moving pieces in terms of strategy and personnel is so enormous that you have to be intimately familiar with it over weeks to be able to adapt in real time. And yet I hear people assert with complete confidence that where Belichick went wrong in the 2007 Super Bowl was that he didn't run enough, because you have to establish the run in order to pass. This is an intelligent person with a responsible job in a technical field who said this, pointing out this cliche to me as if it were obvious Received Wisdom. This happens all the time, even among people who are sober and measured in other evaluations. They know absolutely nothing about football at high levels but they still are sure they have it figured out.
Because they have watched every preseason game and all the regular season games, so something in their brain tells them they know as much as anyone else, or nearly so. They don't but they feel it is true.
Basketball is in between. There are numerous tactical decisions about substitution, rotations, and assignments, and these matter, but a lot of the job is managing player attitudes. A lot of that has to do with the number of players on the floor at any one time. In basketball it is very few, and even the nicest guys have to be massaged or they get all upset. More like race horses than Golden Retrievers. Even in foreign countries, the players have been treated as special since they were fourteen.
1 comment:
In fairness to your friend I think a lot of the talk about football is fulfilment of its social role of 'giving acquaintances something to talk about,' which is why there is so much received wisdom. Just as the point of things like salad forks is to let everyone know they're doing the right thing when eating together, those phrases are 'the right thing' to say even if they aren't strictly true.
I remember Joe Montana's 1980s 49ers as a counter example: everybody knew he was going to throw, and pretty much knew to whom he was going to throw. He'd still throw 26 touchdowns in a season or stomp his Super Bowl opponents 55-10. Establishing the run was a sideshow at best.
Nevertheless, as a truism that serves like a salad fork, 'everyone knows you have to establish the running game in order to be able to throw' is just one of the things you say.
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